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The Program in Religious Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, in cooperation with the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, invites applications for a one-year postdoctoral teaching fellowship in East Asian Religions to begin in August 2015. While the area of specialization is open, expertise in Buddhism in the context of East Asian Religions is preferred.... Click here for more information.

Congratulations to Prof. Stephanie Kirk on being selected as a Fall 2015 faculty fellow at the Center for the Humanities.Kirk will translate Carlos De Sigüenza Y Góngora’s Western Paradise [Parayso Occidental] (1684), a unique and multi-faceted 17th-century text, making it available in English for the first time for scholars and teachers interested in gender, religion, race, and empire. Western Paradise is a chronicle of the foundation and first 100 years of Mexico City’s convent of Jesús María written by the colonial creole polymath Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700). Sigüenza y Góngora relates much about Mexico’s highly-developed convent culture but also goes beyond the cloister to detail the complexities of life in the great colonial city. Western Paradise stands as a foundational literary text and cultural document of the Mexican canon. Sigüenza y Góngora attempts to rewrite` history by replacing the conquistador’s European past with the creole’s American beginnings, and in this way articulates an incipient Mexican patriotism.

Few will contest the fact that, despite predictions to the contrary, religion continues to play a central role in contemporary culture, politics, identity, and conflict in every part of the globe. At the same time, the fast-moving forces of globalization, migration, and technology continue to bring diverse religious communities in closer proximity, often creating new religious communities in the process. As a result, it has become ever more essential for people living in today’s world to be “religiously literate.”

The Religious Studies Program at Washington University is designed to provide students with the opportunity to not only acquire basic knowledge of the beliefs and practices of the major world religions, but also learn how to engage in a critical appraisal of both their historic and their contemporary significance. Many of the courses offered through our program are taught by faculty in different disciplines and areas, including History, English Literature, Classics, Anthropology, American Religion and Politics, and East Asian Studies. They explore religion and religious traditions in all their interdisciplinary complexity—often comparatively, sometimes thematically, and almost always in specific historical and cultural contexts.....More

J. Albert Harrill, Professor of Classics and History at the Ohio State University, is the author, most recently, of Paul the Apostle: His Life and Legacy in Their Roman Context. In his lecture, Harrill asks whether Paul’s letters influenced the production of our earliest surviving gospels.

Writing in Water (2012) by Angela Zito is the fourth and final film presented in the Religion & Politics Film Series. The film follows two generations of calligraphy teachers, Wang Tongxing and Liu Lanbo, through the eyes of an American who learned to write with them, in Tuanjiehu Park, Beijing, where they practice writing on the plaza everyday.Angela Zito is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Religious Studies; Director, Religious Studies Program; and Co-director of the Center for Religion and Media at New York University.